Charles Denney and Wahkootowin: How a Populist Genealogist Inadvertently Shaped Metis Identity in Western Archives, 1967-2002
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the genealogical collection held at the Glenbow Archives in Calgary. Curated by Edmonton genealogist Charles Denney and collected from the mid-1960s up until his death in 2002, the collection documented the genealogical data of Metis families. The Denney collection is not merely a repository of information. It actively contributes to the construction of contemporary Metis identities. Denney’s collection began with documenting his Metis wife Mildred Sherlock’s family history. The collection changed through Denney’s ‘kitchen table’ collaborations with Metis genealogists Clarence Kipling and Pat McCloy, its purchase by the Glenbow archives, and the use of the Denney collection by the Metis Nation to pursue wahkootowin (relatedness) and post-Powley section 35 rights. By critically engaging with genealogical records, this dissertation concludes that Denney’s archive was guided by the Metis concept of wahkootowin. Although these genealogies originated in a colonial concept of white-pioneer narratives, they have transformed into an act of Metis agency that asserts Metis identities and sovereignty. This study emphasizes the importance of understanding the creation and curation of archival collections and their impact on the recognition and preservation of Indigenous worldviews.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".